Live data from Hacker News

FFmpeg 9.0

github.com

101–107 of 107 posts

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#101
post #52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though there is one part I didn’t understand in that interview. They were complaining of being overwhelmed by AI submitted bug reports (fair), including for obscure codecs that must have been used by a couple of users at most. And therefore implying that securing those codecs is low priority/important. I don’t understand that. To me the severity has nothing to do with how popular is a code path, but whether that code…

That sounds nice in theory, but it seems obvious to me there is a major discrepancy between who is burdened with this responsibility, and who benefits from the result. Given many of these contributors are unpaid volunteers, maybe the infrastructure provider needs to secure FFmpeg in another way, for example by restricting codecs or by running it in a container?

They claimed that this was not a problem since the codec was so uncommon, but without doing steps like removing it from the main tree or making it not built by default in major distros.

I understand that from the perspective of "how many people will this crash for", but from a security perspective it is nonsensical. Even if it is an uncommon codec if the authors decide to keep the codepath there by default it is exploitable in most installs.

I love ffmpeg but that whole episode left a bit of a bad taste.

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about time in the day, my friend. Do you want to secure a feature used by 100% of your users or 0.01% of your users? Which has a better ROI?

It's used by most users, that's what they are saying, it doesn't matter that the file format is obscure. If you make a video player based on ffmpeg you take input videos. The attacker can share a specially crafted video with the victim. Same kind of attack as sharing word documents.

If Big Deployment is using a stock ffmpeg build rather than one that actually enables only the things they actually use, I feel like that's on Big Deployment.

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#104
Bless everyone who has the patience to deal with all the crazy crap audio video etc codecs and stuff throws out there and they figure out ways to put it into a free tool suite.

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#105

Seems Michael Niedermayer wrote that manually, without AI. Good for him. :P ffmpeg is great, I think nobody disputes this. I use it in two ways mostly: 1) one, via mpv, and 2) two, as conversion tool primarily ffmpeg also has many really powerful filters, but these are very confusing to use IMO and not elegant at all. I'd wish we could use some kind of simple meta-language or so, in part similar to virtualdub/avisynt…

ffmpeg's filter system is what you get when you design a meta-language for it.

It's also not that bad once you take a bit of time to learn it - it's just a textual encoding of a graph where each node is a filter with a number of properties.

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#106
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used by most users, that's what they are saying, it doesn't matter that the file format is obscure. If you make a video player based on ffmpeg you take input videos. The attacker can share a specially crafted video with the victim. Same kind of attack as sharing word documents.

If Big Deployment is using a stock ffmpeg build rather than one that actually enables only the things they actually use, I feel like that's on Big Deployment.

But the point of ffmpeg is that it can consume pretty much any format. If you let end users upload videos, that is exactly what you need, it’s not desirable to have a very restrictive list of formats you will accept.

Re: FFmpeg 9.0

#107
post #106
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Big Deployment is using a stock ffmpeg build rather than one that actually enables only the things they actually use, I feel like that's on Big Deployment.

But the point of ffmpeg is that it can consume pretty much any format. If you let end users upload videos, that is exactly what you need, it’s not desirable to have a very restrictive list of formats you will accept.

Not having massive exposed and untested surface area is very much desireable. Every platform has a highly restrictive list of formats and containers for this exact reason.
Post reply on HN